Central European origin

[-JKP-]

I haven't dismissed anything, including the Americas, I simply think some are more likely than others.

I'm always perplexed when I see people identify a VMS plant as a specific species. The drawings are not detailed enough to narrow any of them down to a specific species—even the Viola has about four likely candidates. Elizabeth Blackwell's botanical drawings are some of the finest of their kind and orders of magnitude better than the VMS drawings, and yet cannot always be identified down to a particular species.


I feel the same way about origins. I have a list of priorities. There are no cutoff points. I have a gray scale from more likely to less likely.

Origins are far more problematic than plants. Plants stay in one place. They can't walk around, they spread slowly (especially so before travel to the Americas and far east became mechanized), but people can and did travel extensively. We're all from Africa, but we profusely populated the far east thousands of years ago.

The Ainu, indigenous people of Japan, have caucasoid features. People from China and Mongolia have traveled to Siberia. The Vikings make it to Newfoundland, the northeastern Asians to North America. The southeast Asians to South and Middle America. Someone from Italy could travel to Madagascar or the Ivory coast. People are born one place, study another, and work another, and were surprisingly mobile in the middle ages. Merchants from China were shipwrecked off the coast of northeast Africa centuries ago. There's an ancient ship that foundered off the coast of Scandinavia that may be from the Mediterranean. Crusaders traveled thousands of miles and brought back many implements and manuscripts from their travels. Some of them stayed in the Levant or farther east, married, and raised kids.


I don't see how someone can decide on the basis of current evidence whether a person from outside Europe created the VMS inside Europe, or whether someone from inside Europe might have created it after spending some time outside of Europe (as the missionaries often did). Some people are very quick to absorb customs from other countries. Richard F. Burton eagerly learned other languages and cultures and even though some people are reluctant to adapt, I'm sure he's not the only one, east or west, who embraced customs from other regions.


Whoever created the VMS clearly had seen European manuscripts, but whether they saw the manuscripts in Europe, or whether they saw them elsewhere (manuscripts DID travel in both directions), is still an open question. The physical evidence is the best evidence we have for its origin (it is obviously not drawn on palm leaves, clay, bamboo, or papyrus) but it does not tell us how broadly the creators (or the mastermind) might have traveled or where they may have settled, for months, perhaps years, before creating the VMS, nor does it tell us where that person was born because the sum total of how much of your culture you bring with you depends partly on how old you were when you moved, and how willing you are to embrace new ideas.


Central Europe is higher on my list than the South Pacific, China, central Africa, Greenland, or the Americas, but I see no reason to take a stand because the data will eventually speak for itself.